The scholiasts supposed that it was Zeus, not Strife, who dwells γαíνσ Έν ŕίζησι, and Paley has punctuated the line accordingly. I do not in any case doubt that he is wrong, but if the Theogony is evidence, he can almost be proved so. In the Theogony the γης ŕίσα;ι are a kind of suburb of Tartarus, from which the author does not very clearly distinguish them. In his useful though somewhat desultory gazetteer of those districts he says that Styx (...) dwells there apart from the gods, and that Iris only comes down when there are oaths to be administered in Olympus. Clearly Zeus is not at home in such a place. Strife herself is not enumerated in the Theogony among the residents, but her family is. Whatever she may be elsewhere, both in the Works and Days and in the Theogony she is the daughter of Night; and in the Theogony not only Night but also her two sons Sleep and Death reside in the district. Strife may appropriately keep them company. (shrink)

On p. 118 I said that the injunction of Pythagoras παρà θνσíαν μxs22EF xs22EFννχíζον, quoted by Goettling with a false reference, might be illuminating in its context but that I suspected it of being a figment. My suspicions were unfounded. The reference, as Mr. A. B. Cook has kindly pointed out to me, is Iambl. Protrept. 364 K.; but Iamblichus's explanation—that ‘nails’ stands for one's remoter kinsfolk, οíον xs22EFνεψιáδαι xs22EF πατραδxs22EFλφων γαμβρονοτιδεîς xs22EF τοιοντοí τινες, with whom one should renew relations (...) on festal days—does not seem very helpful. (shrink)

On p. 118 I said that the injunction of Pythagoras παρà θνσíαν μxs22EF xs22EFννχíζον, quoted by Goettling with a false reference, might be illuminating in its context but that I suspected it of being a figment. My suspicions were unfounded. The reference, as Mr. A. B. Cook has kindly pointed out to me, is Iambl. Protrept. 364 K.; but Iamblichus's explanation—that ‘nails’ stands for one's remoter kinsfolk, οíον xs22EFνεψιáδαι xs22EF πατραδxs22EFλφων γαμβρονοτιδεîς xs22EF τοιοντοí τινες, with whom one should renew relations (...) on festal days—does not seem very helpful. (shrink)

The scholiasts supposed that it was Zeus, not Strife, who dwells γαíνσ Έν ŕίζησι, and Paley has punctuated the line accordingly. I do not in any case doubt that he is wrong, but if the Theogony is evidence, he can almost be proved so. In the Theogony the γης ŕίσα;ι are a kind of suburb of Tartarus, from which the author does not very clearly distinguish them. In his useful though somewhat desultory gazetteer of those districts he says that Styx (...) dwells there apart from the gods, and that Iris only comes down when there are oaths to be administered in Olympus. Clearly Zeus is not at home in such a place. Strife herself is not enumerated in the Theogony among the residents, but her family is. Whatever she may be elsewhere, both in the Works and Days and in the Theogony she is the daughter of Night; and in the Theogony not only Night but also her two sons Sleep and Death reside in the district. Strife may appropriately keep them company. (shrink)

In their introduction to the recent excellent volume Plato & Hesiod, the editors G.R. Boys-Stones and J.H. Haubold observe that when we think about the problematic relationship between Plato and the poets, we tend to narrow this down to that between Plato and Homer. Hesiod is practically ignored. Unjustly so, the editors argue. Hesiod provides a good opportunity to start thinking more broadly about Plato's interaction with poets and poetry, not in the least because the ‘second poet’ of Greece represents (...) a different type of poetry from Homer's heroic epics, that of didactic poetry. What goes for Plato and Hesiod goes for Proclus and Hesiod. Proclus , the productive head of the Neoplatonic school in Athens, took a great interest in poetry to which he was far more positively disposed than Plato had ever been. He wrote, for example, two lengthy treatises in reaction to Socrates' devastating criticism of poetry in the Republic as part of his commentary on that work in which he tries to keep the poets within the Platonic pale. This intriguing aspect of Proclus' thought has, as one might expect, not failed to attract scholarly attention. In Proclus' case too, however, discussions tend to concentrate on his attitude towards Homer . To some extent this is only to be expected, since much of the discussion in the Commentary on the Republic centres on passages from Homer. Proclus did not, however, disregard Hesiod: we still possess his scholia on the Works and Days, now available in a recent edition by Patrizia Marzillo. (shrink)

Evelyn-White, Mair, and Brown all translated Hesiod into prose; Lattimore now offers us a very readable translation in blank verse. He writes, as Robert Lowell remarked, "the most accurate verse translations in the language." An attractive and refreshing volume.--L. S. F.

The Works and Days is contained in far more manuscripts than the other Hesiodic poems. Altogether there are something over 260, as against seventyodd for the Theogony and sixty-odd for the Shield. Over a hundred of them are later than 1480, the approximate date of the earliest printed edition of the poem; but even when these are subtracted, a formidable number remains, many of which have never been investigated. The present century has seen more done in the way (...) of cataloguing them than the nineteenth, but less in the way of collating them. Since N. A. Livadaras published his list of Hesiod manuscripts in 1963, the disparity between what has been done and what might be done has become more apparent than ever before. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking book, which includes a powerful new translation of Hesiod's Works and Days by esteemed translator David Grene, Stephanie Nelson argues that a society's vision of farming contains deep indications about its view of the human place within nature, and our relationship to the divine. She contends that both Hesiod in the Works and Days and Vergil in the Georgics saw farming in this way, and so wrote their poems not only about farming itself, (...) but also about its deeper ethical and religious implications. Hesiod, Nelson argues, saw farming as revealing that man must live by the sweat of his brow, and that good, for human beings, must always be accompanied by hardship. Within this vision justice, competition, cooperation, and the need for labor take their place alongside the uncertainties of the seasons and even of particular lucky and unlucky days to form a meaningful whole within which human life is an integral part. Vergil, Nelson argues, deliberately modeled his poem upon the Works and Days, and did so in order to reveal that his is a very different vision. Hesiod saw the hardship in farming; Vergil sees its violence as well. Farming is for him both our life within nature, and also our battle against her. Against the background of Hesiods poem, which found a single meaning for human life, Vergil thus creates a split vision and suggests that human beings may be radically alienated from both nature and the divine. Nelson argues that both the Georgics and the Works and Days have been misread because scholars have not seen the importance of the connection between the two poems, and because they have not seen that farming is the true concern of both, farming in its deepest and most profoundly unsettling sense. (shrink)

This article presents a detailed study of an early section of the actual works and days of Hesiod's Works and Days. The treatment consistently eschews obsolete assumptions about this poem, in particular that it reduces to a didactic presentation to the early Greek farmer. A key principle of the method followed is to pay closer attention to the text's relation to epic forms than has been typical among the poem's commentators. The result is to find that (...) a certain literary figure gradually develops in the section discussed. Namely, the plowing nominally covered there stands for the section's portion on the human condition, a condition implicitly compared with that associated with traditional epic. The figure evokes a well-rounded person, aware of the divine and of the world's uncertainties, with a long-term sense of purpose involving good organization of one's life, as opposed to someone engaged in helter-skelter pursuit of transitory activities, perhaps war specifically. With this identification of virtual protagonist established by the end of the section, the ground is prepared for any further development of the figure as that entity's undertakings or adventures in the remainder of the poem. (shrink)

Hesiod’s Fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale remains a scholarly problem: its “might is right” moral seems to counteract the point that the poet appears to be making in this part of the Works and Days. Moreover, it is introduced with an address to the kings but finishes immediately prior to a dislocated appellation to Hesiod’s brother Perses. We have no clearly analogous fable to set next to this one. In this paper I step outside the Greek (...) tradition and present a comparable story from the Indic Mahābhārata that involves not only a hawk and a dove but also a king who protects the latter. I argue that the material it supplies can help us in our interpretation of the Hesiodic fable by opening up the possibility that there is in fact a third character within the drama – absent from the text itself but essential for our understanding of it – who had the power to protect the nightingale from the hawk but who failed to do so. (shrink)

Mettre le noos en relation avec les idées de « panaristos » et de « méga nèpios » permet d’étudier les spécificités du concept noétique chez Hésiode lequel est le plus souvent amalgamé, dans les recherches sur l’évolution historique du noos/noein, à Homère. La présente étude propose d’articuler davantage le noos/noein dans les objectifs poétiques propres aux Travaux et Jours d’où émerge une vision particulière de l’activité psychique de l’individu grec archaïque, depuis le sot ignorant (Persès et les mauvais rois) (...) jusqu’au poète sachant (Hésiode lui-même). Il convient également de montrer comment Hésiode établit une nouvelle hiérarchie des créatures sur la base du noos qui devient consubstantiel à la dikè. Ensemble, ces deux paramètres sont insérés dans un discours à la fois poétique et politique où s’illustre entre autre le mythe des races. Le noos sert tout particulièrement l’autorité poétique d’Hésiode contre celle des rois et révèle une vision à part de l’intelligence. (shrink)

The Works and Days is contained in far more manuscripts than the other Hesiodic poems. Altogether there are something over 260, as against seventyodd for the Theogony and sixty-odd for the Shield. Over a hundred of them are later than 1480, the approximate date of the earliest printed edition of the poem; but even when these are subtracted, a formidable number remains, many of which have never been investigated. The present century has seen more done in the way (...) of cataloguing them than the nineteenth, but less in the way of collating them. Since N. A. Livadaras published his list of Hesiod manuscripts in 1963, the disparity between what has been done and what might be done has become more apparent than ever before. (shrink)

The total surviving output of the Hesiodic school of Greek Epic is too little, in point of sheer quantity, to afford an insight into social life and outlook comparable with that offered by the Homeric poems. Worse still, it is too heterogeneous a collection to form a meaningful social document.